Picture It: The Creation Story Comes to Life

Title: The Koren Magerman Tanakh Graphic Novel – Bereshit – Volume 1: The Beginning

By: Jordan B. Gorfinkel, et al.

Koren Publishers

(204 pages)

Koren Publishers is distinguishing itself as the most creative, innovative publisher of Judaica for the 21^st century, with numerous groundbreaking texts appearing in multiple series, from the first siddur in Amharic for Ethiopian Jews to the remarkable Tanakh of the Land of Israel. As an avid reader, I am consistently amazed by the diversity of Jewish readers that Koren reaches, and this new ambitious project holds phenomenal promise: a multi-volume, large-format graphic novel rendition of Tanach, informed by high standards of artistic presentation, scholarly content, and religious fidelity.

It’s almost too good. The images are so striking, so dense with layered allusions to the Rabbinic corpus of thousands of years of interpretation, that I can only imagine that a book like this might be overwhelming to many younger readers. I speak from experience – I first saw Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956) when I was about eight years old, and I was truly mesmerized and transformed. Years of yeshiva and kollel study could not, however, remove the image of Charlton Heston from my mind whenever I think of Moshe Rabbeinu (don’t even ask about the Nefertiti business). So, parents should proceed with caution – this is an amazing work, so much so that it may color a young person’s imagination for decades.

The premise is straightforward: The full Hebrew text appears in characteristically gorgeous Koren font, usually on a generous white background on the left-hand page (the book opens with Hebrew orientation), while the right-hand page uses comic-book-style panels and English translations alongside beautiful, often clever and insightful illustrations. The feeling is both youthful and sophisticated, with a graphic sensibility that somehow captures contemporary emoji-like iconography while retaining dignity and gravitas. Unlike other graphic novel adaptations of Biblical texts I’ve seen, mostly published by conservative Christian publishers, this book is never cheesy. It also deals with the hard parts with considerable ingenuity, such as the presentation of the first Adam as an androgynous being, in accordance with the Midrashic teaching (Bereshit Rabbah 8:1). Adam is depicted as a luminous being of indeterminate gender, with a kind of double-image shadow that suggests both male and female aspects of the first human.

The illustrations are soaked in traditional Jewish teachings – everything from representing the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden as a type of fig to capturing the ark-riding adventure of Og, King of Bashan. There are distinctly modern interpolations as well: the continents of pre-Adamic Earth are shown in a configuration something like Pangaea, and dinosaurs appear as part of the Creation story of land animals. Perhaps more significantly, the presentation of the text in images means that the artists were forced to choose only one of the many variant interpretations to depict in the panel, freezing, as it were, only one of Rashi’s comments in place while unfortunately sacrificing others. In a text-only presentation, the reader is free to create alternate visualizations based on the strength of his or her own imagination, not possible when viewing an artistic representation. Parents buying this book for their children should be prepared for some potentially hard questions.

Bottom line: I loved this book, which covers only the first two parshiyot, Bereshit and Noach, and I can’t wait to read forthcoming volumes. I really look forward to sharing it with my grandchildren, as I have with the Jonah and Esther volumes. User experience: My granddaughter Hadassah was entranced by the presentation of her namesake in the Esther volume – Esther is portrayed as the most heroic, generous, and, of course, beautiful queen one could possibly imagine, and that’s pretty much the result I was hoping for when Hadassah and I read it together, over and over. So, I definitely intend to read this graphic novel with my grandchildren, but only after receiving permission from their parents.